ZanzibarZim
Chieftain
I haven't played CivII in years, but I saw this on CNN.com and knew I had to try it for myself. Amazingly, my old laptop (20 minutes to boot up) still has CivII on it and I still have the disk.
I'm three evenings into it now, about 25-30 turns.
Pollution: I've had 2 rounds of global warming and coming up on a third. The Americans have remained allied, giving me the opportunity to clean up a lot of pollution in the areas where our cities are intermingled. I’ve left the Viking engineers unmolested so they can clean up their own mess. Global pollution is now down from about 170 polluted squares to about 70. Global warming will stop once I get it down under 10 squares.
Nuclear stand-off: One thing I learned long ago is that Sid Meir believed in the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. If you build a few nukes and then save them and don’t use them, the AI civs will almost never use theirs. In all my years of playing, it only happened to me once. So I built three ICBM’s and put them in three front-line cities. I know the Vikings have nukes, but they haven’t tried to use them.
Industry: My industrial production is now about 150% higher, thanks to investment in harbors and platforms. The downside to this is that the remote island cities tend to have the best production, complicating logistics.
Fundamentalism’s fatal flaw: Fundamentalism’s fatal flaw is that although units are almost impossible to bribe, cities are easy to bribe. “So, 900 gold for your entire fully-built-up city with 2 Wonders and 5 units? I’ll take it.” Heck, you can sell the unnecessary improvements to get all your cash back and even turn a nice profit.
Population: Down about 5%, in spite of captured and new-built cities. This is probably due to the production of numerous engineer units.
The War: I've got the Vikings on the ropes, having taken about 10 cities, including most of their cities with wonders. My artillery stack is about 20 units now, so next turn I’ll start a wack-a-mole campaign versus the Viking capital. This will cost them their best remaining cities and deplete their treasury, making bribery cheaper and therefore more effective.
I can’t possibly stretch this out for 500 turns. Maybe 20-30 more turns to finish world conquest. The fact that everything is swamp and jungle makes offensive operations far more difficult, since it inhibits movement and provides defensive bonuses to the city defenders. So this might be optimistic. I will probably need to use a lot more artillery per city than I normally would.
Things I won’t do, just because I’m stubborn:
1 - I won’t switch governments to fundamentalism. I’ve never used it.
2 – I won’t leave a speck of pollution anywhere.
3 – I won’t take advantage of the fact that the “too-many-cities-built, too-many-cities-destroyed” glitch means that I can “home city” units to certain cities and get NON units. Yes, I could make my entire army (and esp. engineers) completely free of support requirements.
I'm three evenings into it now, about 25-30 turns.
Pollution: I've had 2 rounds of global warming and coming up on a third. The Americans have remained allied, giving me the opportunity to clean up a lot of pollution in the areas where our cities are intermingled. I’ve left the Viking engineers unmolested so they can clean up their own mess. Global pollution is now down from about 170 polluted squares to about 70. Global warming will stop once I get it down under 10 squares.
Nuclear stand-off: One thing I learned long ago is that Sid Meir believed in the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. If you build a few nukes and then save them and don’t use them, the AI civs will almost never use theirs. In all my years of playing, it only happened to me once. So I built three ICBM’s and put them in three front-line cities. I know the Vikings have nukes, but they haven’t tried to use them.
Industry: My industrial production is now about 150% higher, thanks to investment in harbors and platforms. The downside to this is that the remote island cities tend to have the best production, complicating logistics.
Fundamentalism’s fatal flaw: Fundamentalism’s fatal flaw is that although units are almost impossible to bribe, cities are easy to bribe. “So, 900 gold for your entire fully-built-up city with 2 Wonders and 5 units? I’ll take it.” Heck, you can sell the unnecessary improvements to get all your cash back and even turn a nice profit.
Population: Down about 5%, in spite of captured and new-built cities. This is probably due to the production of numerous engineer units.
The War: I've got the Vikings on the ropes, having taken about 10 cities, including most of their cities with wonders. My artillery stack is about 20 units now, so next turn I’ll start a wack-a-mole campaign versus the Viking capital. This will cost them their best remaining cities and deplete their treasury, making bribery cheaper and therefore more effective.
I can’t possibly stretch this out for 500 turns. Maybe 20-30 more turns to finish world conquest. The fact that everything is swamp and jungle makes offensive operations far more difficult, since it inhibits movement and provides defensive bonuses to the city defenders. So this might be optimistic. I will probably need to use a lot more artillery per city than I normally would.
Things I won’t do, just because I’m stubborn:
1 - I won’t switch governments to fundamentalism. I’ve never used it.
2 – I won’t leave a speck of pollution anywhere.
3 – I won’t take advantage of the fact that the “too-many-cities-built, too-many-cities-destroyed” glitch means that I can “home city” units to certain cities and get NON units. Yes, I could make my entire army (and esp. engineers) completely free of support requirements.
Holy Moses!
